Vernon in his new frame of mind could scarcely forbear telling his love of the ills he had intended towards her. He had caught a passion for frankness and would have poured into her ears the whole of his past. He could not endure, to such elation had he been carried, that Phyllida should be ignorant of the worst of him in order that for the future she should know more truly the very best of him. But he was wise and, though Cupid had lent him his own wings, he would not play too many aerial pranks, soar too near the sun, fall and break his neck. It was indeed a form of abnegation that prevented him from showing Phyllida his own bad self. It was bitter to hear her murmur, with a white hand on his sleeve. "I knew you were true, my true love, all the time, all the time." Nothing tugs at the heart-strings of a man like a young maid's plighting of her troth. Nothing makes his brain reel like her first kiss freely given. "Oh, Phyllida, Phyllida! I'm not fit for you." "Foolish Amor." "Are you happy, my dearest?" "Oh, so happy." "We shall never be parted again." "Never!" "I did not know that life was so wonderful." "I thought it was," she murmured, as she nestled to his heart, "because Spring was always so sweet, and now I need never mind the Winter." "All the years I did not know you, my Phyllida, were wasted years." "Amor!" "Phyllida!" "How I shall always love you." "Always?" "To the end." "Once," she said with a sigh, "I longed to grow old, and now I would like to be always young." "Ah! Phyllida, my Phyllida, don't speak of age. I've wasted so much of my life." He thought with anguish of the dead Summers he had known and wondered with a great dread whether they would come again. If, while he could still feel this splendid passion, they should be grey and dismal, he would never forgive himself for having revelled in the warmth and gaiety of those irrevocable seasons. "You are not sad?" she asked, jealous of his silence. "I wish that life were not so short." Our villain was beginning to examine the foundations of his existence upon this earth, where hitherto he had jogged along, accepting the most outrageous calamity and good luck with placid superficial mind. Meditation upon the brevity of a life, which at any moment a tavern brawl might extinguish, would have seemed to him before this passionate conversation a lunatick method of spending time. Poor villain! he had not enjoyed much leisure for meditation. He was born in a hurry, his mother being under contract to appear as Millamant a long while before she should. He was brought up in a hurry at Alleyn's School to be murdered in a hurry by some Richard III. Moreover, in youth he had assisted at so many tinsel deaths that it was not surprizing he should regard them lightly. Even his mother's death within sound of the orange girls outside Drury Lane struck him as nothing more final than a last appearance.